1. Field of The Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer system user interfaces, and more particularly to a windowed computer system user interface that includes a mini-icon in the window title bar.
2. Description of The Prior Art
Conventional systems provide icons to represent objects. These icons may be directly manipulated to perform useful tasks. For example, an icon for a document may be dragged to a printer to print the document. Context menus may also be used to perform tasks with icons. A context menu is a list of actions presented near the indicated object. Context menus are also referred to as pop-up menus in the industry.
Icons may also be opened to create a window within which a portion of the object is depicted. For example, opening the icon for a document depicts a portion of the document on the computer screen within the window's frame. The user can then work with the document and then make changes if desired. Conventional systems provide support for users to work on several tasks on a single workstation.
Often a user may wish to perform some task via direct manipulation or via a context menu on an object he/she has opened in a window. For example, a user may be editing a document in a window and wish to print the current rough draft of the document. Direct manipulation and context menu techniques for this action require that the object's icons be visible.
However, when the user opens an object in a window to work with it, often the object's icon is hidden by the newly created window. The icon may also be hidden due to the subsequent repositioning, scrolling or resizing of windows on the computer screen. An icon can also be hidden if the window displaying the icon is closed. In all of these cases, although the window opened from the icon is visible, the icon is hidden and therefore cannot be used for tasks involving techniques such as direct manipulation or context menus.
For certain tasks, techniques such as action bar pull-downs may provide alternate methods of accomplishing a task for certain application windows. One disadvantage of this approach is that it typically does not follow the object-action paradigm normally used by the action bar. That is, normally an action bar action affects the object selected in the window. For example, some current applications use the print action to print the entire document, rather than just selected text. This approach presents problems when users wish to print just the selected portion of the document. For example, a user may have a chart imbedded in a document and wish to print only the chart and not the entire document. Another example might be a user who wishes to print only selected pages of a document. This is not possible if the print action has already been used to print the entire document, ignoring selections.